"Many folk live unworthy lives. They live them amid discord, abasement, and wrongs innumerable, wrongs born of want and stupidity."
And as the words leave my lips my mind loses itself in recollections of all the dark and harrowing and shameful scenes that I have beheld.
"Listen," I say. "You may approach a man with nothing but good in your heart, and be prepared to surrender both your freedom and your strength; yet still he may fail to understand you aright. And how shall he be blamed for this, seeing that never may he have been shown what is good?"
She lays a hand upon my shoulder, and looks straight into my eyes as she parts her comely lips.
"True," she rejoins—"But, dear friend, it is also true that goodness never bargains."
Together she and I seem to be drifting towards a vista which is coming to look, as it sloughs the shadow of night, ever clearer and clearer. It is a vista of white huts, silvery trees, a red church, and dew-bespangled earth. And as the sun rises he reveals to us clustered, transparent clouds which, like thousands of snow-white birds, go gliding over our heads.
"Yes," she whispers again as gently she gives me a nudge. "As one pursues one's lonely way one thinks and thinks—but of what? Dear friend, you have said that no one really cares what is the matter. Ah, HOW true that is!"
Here she springs to her feet, and, pulling me up with her, glues herself to my breast with a vehemence which causes me momentarily to push her away. Upon this, bursting into tears, she tends towards me again, and kisses me with lips so dry as almost to cut me—she kisses me in a way which penetrates to my very soul.
"You have been oh, so good!" she whispers softly. As she speaks, the earth seems to be sinking under my feet.
Then she tears herself away, glances around the courtyard, and darts to a corner where, under a fence, a clump of herbage is sprouting.